Guild Wars 2>News>Structured Player vs. Player: The Iceberg
Structured Player vs. Player: The Iceberg

by Jonathan Sharp on October 8, 2012

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Jonathan Sharp on the (Near) Future of Guild Wars 2 PvP

Here at ArenaNet we’re passionate about our game. Like… sickly passionate. We want Guild Wars 2 to be good, and we want our players to enjoy it. Even if true perfection is an unreachable idea, we still want to strive for it, dammit!

Due to that desire to make the best game possible, we iterate. A lot. We take an idea, we build it, we test it, we make changes, we test it again, we add to it, we test some more, we take something away, we test again…. you get the idea.

So when we say we’ll show something “when it’s ready,” we really mean it. We don’t want to talk about it until we’re ready to show it, because it may change. We may come up with a better idea, we may receive data that shows why a feature needs to be tweaked, or we may find a new solution in the course of testing that’s superior to our original idea. That’s how game development works. We don’t want to talk to you about things too soon, and then have those things change. We don’t want to make empty promises to you. We like to talk about things once they’re ready. Do we get everything perfect? NO WAY. J But it’s still a goal.

Structured Player vs. Player (sPvP) is a core feature in Guild Wars 2, and it’s quite massive. The features we want to add to sPvP, to use an analogy, are like an iceberg…It’s more than we’ve been able to say so far. And like all our other game types, we talk about sPvP features when they’re ready. We shipped the game with some key features, but a lot of features we wanted to show at release simply weren’t ready. So now we’d like to start talking about some coming features that, until now, have been beneath the surface of the ocean on our metaphorical iceberg.

First, let’s talk about free automated tournaments, the new paid automated tournaments, and the differences between them. After that we’ll talk about another new feature – custom arenas.
Free Automated Tournaments

Free automated tournaments are what you can play right now. Many players (according to our numbers) have tried them out and seem to enjoy them. The free automated tournaments are meant to be friendly to new players, allowing people to randomly form teams and try to win some cool loot. You can even play them solo, and get auto-matched with other players who don’t have a full team. The idea is that they’re open to anyone, and should allow new players to meet other new players.

Once players have cut their teeth on the free automated tournaments and feel they’re ready, we expect them to step up to paid automated tournaments, where the competition will become more intense.

Here’s the reward breakdown for free automated tournaments:

1st place – 1 Gold Free Tournament Reward Chest, 300 glory, 300 rank points

2nd place – 1 Silver Free Tournament Reward Chest, 200 glory, 200 rank points

3rd place – 1 Copper Free Tournament Reward Chest, 100 glory, 100 rank points

4th place – 1 Copper Free Tournament Reward Chest, 100 glory, 100 rank points

5th place – No reward

6th place – No reward

7th place – No reward

8th place – No reward

As you can see, the top four teams will get glory (which they can spend in the Heart of the Mists on aesthetic rewards), rank points (which help you become more awesome as you rank up in sPvP) and different types of reward chests.